View of the City of Rome

admin — Wed, 18 May 2016 10:12:04 +0000

This engraving, one of more than 600 woodcuts illustrating the incunabulum of Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493), presents a view of the city of Rome at the end of the fifteenth century. On the right-hand side of the foglio, St Peters Basilica may clearly be seen before the changes made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with the Papal Palace and the old Borgo, Castello Sant’Angelo and Ponte Sant’Angelo, the Ospedale Santo Spirito, Porta Pinciana, Porta Flaminia and the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The engraver, who had evidently never set foot in Rome and did not speak Italian, depicted the Vatican obelisk (la guia) – at that time still located by the side of the Basilica – as a tower. On the left-hand side of the foglio, one may clearly make out the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the statues of the Dioscuri (today in Piazza del Quirinale), and of the Nile River (now at the Capitoline), the recently-built Ponte Sisto and, on the far side of the river, Santa Maria in Trastevere. In the middle, the spiralling column that, at that time, was erroneously identified as being dedicated to Anthony (in actual fact it had been dedicated to Marcus Aurelius) still lacked the statue of St Paul that Sixtus V had placed on its summit a century later.

Map of Rome. Engraving by Mattheus Merian based on Antonio Tempesta’s map of 1593

admin — Wed, 18 May 2016 10:12:05 +0000

This delightful representation of the city of Rome as viewed from the Janiculum Hill was engraved in the mid-1600s by Mattheus Merian. It reproduces the perspective map drawn “from life” by Antonio Tempesta in 1593. The map depicts Rome at the end of the sixteenth century, including the major urban transformations undertaken under the papacies of Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, with wide, straight roads connecting the city’s main hubs, and the tall obelisks that Sixtus V had erected in St Peter’s Square, the Lateran, St Mary Major and Piazza del Popolo. The map lacks a number of monuments that later became symbols of the city but had not yet been built at that time: Bernini’s colonnade in St Peter’s Square, the Fontana dei Fiumi in Piazza Navona, the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps.

Papal Plans for Urban Redevelopment and the Town’s Road System – ANTIQUORUM HABET

View of the City of Rome

Map of Rome. Engraving by Mattheus Merian based on Antonio Tempesta’s map of 1593